age; but those princes were surrounded by veteran generals of distinguished skill, to whose suggestions must be attributed the victories of the Granicus, of Rocroi, and of Narva. Clive, an inexperienced youth, had yet more experience than any of those who served 5 under him. He had to form himself, to form his officers, and to form his army. The only man, as far as we recollect, who at an equally early age ever gave equal proof of talents for war, was Napoleon Bonaparte.

From Clive's second visit to India dates the political 10 ascendency of the English in that country. His dexterity and resolution realized, in the course of a few months, more than all the gorgeous visions which had floated before the imagination of Dupleix. Such an extent of cultivated territory, such an amount of reve- 15 nue, such a multitude of subjects, was never added to the dominion of Rome by the most successful proconsul. Nor were such wealthy spoils ever borne under arches of triumph, down the Sacred Way, and through the crowded Forum, to the threshold of Tar-20 peian Jove. The fame of those who subdued Antiochus° and Tigranes grows dim when compared with the splendor of the exploits which the young English adventurer achieved at the head of an army not equal in numbers to one-half of a Roman legion.

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From Clive's third visit to India dates the purity of the administration of our Eastern empire. When he landed in Calcutta in 1765, Bengal was regarded as a place to which Englishmen were sent only to get rich, 5 by any means, in the shortest possible time. He first made dauntless and unsparing war on that gigantic system of oppression, extortion, and corruption. In that war he manfully put to hazard his ease, his fame, and his splendid fortune. The same sense of justice 10 which forbids us to conceal or extenuate the faults of his earlier days compels us to admit that those faults were nobly repaired. If the reproach of the Company and of its servants has been taken away, if in India the yoke of foreign masters, elsewhere the heaviest of 15 all yokes, has been found lighter than that of any native dynasty, if to that gang of public robbers, which formerly spread terror through the whole plain of Bengal, has succeeded a body of functionaries not more highly distinguished by ability and diligence 20 than by integrity, disinterestedness, and public spirit, if we now see such men as Munro, Elphinstone, and Metcalfe, after leading victorious armies, after making and deposing kings, return, proud of their honorable poverty, from a land which once held out to every 25 greedy factor the hope of boundless wealth, the praise

is in no small measure due to Clive. His name stands high on the roll of conquerors. But it is found in a better list, in the list of those who have done and suffered much for the happiness of mankind. To the warrior, history will assign a place in the same rank 5 with Lucullus and Trajan. Nor will she deny to the reformer a share of that veneration with which France cherishes the memory of Turgot, and with which the latest generations of Hindoos will contemplate the statue of Lord William Bentinck.°

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NOTES

PAGE 1, line 6. Montezuma was imprisoned, of course, by Cortes. See the account in Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico, Book iv, Ch. iii.

1. 7. Atahualpa was treacherously strangled, by order of Pizarro, August 29, 1533. See the account in Prescott's Conquest of Peru, Book ii, Ch. vii; also Appendixes ix and x.

1. 9. The battle of Buxar, 1764, between the native Indian forces and Major (afterward Sir Hector) Munro. The complete victory of the English laid the province of Oude at their feet.

1. 10. The massacre of Patna. Ellis, an Englishman, seized the town of Patna in 1763, but Meer Cossim almost immediately recaptured it, making prisoners of Ellis and his force of about one hundred and fifty Englishmen. Shortly afterward, Meer Cossim was defeated at the battle of Gheriah; and, in revenge, he massacred all his English prisoners at Patna, besides about two thousand sepoys. See p. 101.

1. 11. Surajah Dowlah. Where did he rule? See p. 51, 1. 15 ff. Why does Macaulay here select provinces so widely separated as Oude and Travancore ?

1. 12. Holkar : one of the most powerful of the Hindoo chieftains of Clive's period. He was a Mahratta. He gave much trouble to the English.

1. 13.

The victories of Cortes. Note the piling up of detail

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